Friday, June 29, 2012

Story #1 is
the story gives you five silver linings for the survival of Obamacare.#2 lists the seven tax hikes associated with
Obamacare. #3 lists the 10 worst things about Obamacare.#4 looks at the Robert’s decision to see if
it is a benefit or a tax to those who are opposed to it.#5 links you to a viral video of the
Obamacare decision.#6 is Mickey Klaus’
look at the future for Obamacare and specifically can it be repealed.

Today’s
Thoughts

Today’s SCOTUS ruling makes you wonder if
Obama is thanking his lucky stars his vote against Roberts didn’t carry the
day.

“It
is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political
choices.”Chief Justice
John Roberts on Obamacare So elections do
have consequences.

As we start looking at Obama’s achievements,the
successful completion of the relief well (Deep Water Horizon) was on September 17, 2010 some 148 days
after the disaster occurred.

1. Five Possible Silver Linings in the Obamacare Ruling

I have not been as overwhelmed with grief at the Supreme Court’s decision on
the Affordable Care Act as some of my fellow conservatives. I was
wondering whether I was just being naive, but since I just listened in person
to a talk from Paul Clement, who actually argued the case on behalf of the
states before the Supreme Court, and his feelings seemed to resonate with my
own, I feel a little more confident now to share what might be some of the
silver linings in this decision…:

Cutting to the chase the five silver
linings are 1) it pushes new power grabs out of the commerce clause and into
the taxing power and tax laws are more difficult to pass, 2) as a tax it will
be easier to repeal (no filibusters allowed), 3) the state can now back out of
the Medicaid expansion, 4) the Democrats now own the most deceptive tax hike in
history, and 5) this focuses the election on whether the government should have
more power over the individual or less.

2. Obamacare’s 7 tax hikes on people earning under $250,000

By ruling that ObamaCare is
constitutional, the Supreme Court has set in motion a slew of tax hikes. Well,
someone has to pay for it. For rich
folks, looming big is the 3.8% Medicare surtax on investment income, and the
0.9% Medicare payroll tax hike (from 1.45% to 2.35%). And then there are the
tax hikes for everybody else.

Obama’s pledge against any form of tax increase on Americans
making less than $250,000 a year “was thrown out the window” when he signed the healthcare law, says John Kartch,
communications director with Americans For Tax Reform (founded by anti-tax
crusader Grover Norquist).

Here’s
a rundown of seven ObamaCare tax hikes that affect the hoi polloi…

Now, all the rest of us are going to find out a lot more about what’s in the
2,700-page health overhaul law.
The president now must spend the next four months defending a law that the
majority of Americans dislike, and the more they learn about it, the more they
dislike it. Worse, the part of the law that is the least popular — the
individual mandate — has now been declared a tax.

That’s double jeopardy for the
president: The unpopular mandate stands, and it is called a tax. Either
the president admits it’s a tax as a way of keeping the law on the books, or he
says that the Supreme Court is wrong, that it’s not a tax, in which case his
law would be invalid….

…Here’s a quick checklist of the ten worst things in the law — in addition
to the individual and Medicaid mandates:

1. Employer mandate. Most companies will have to provide
and pay for expensive government-determined health insurance for their
employees or face federal fines.
2. Anti-conscience mandate.
Religious organizations will be required to provide free sterilization,
contraceptives, and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees, even if it
violates their religious beliefs.
3. New and higher taxes.
The law contains at least 20 new taxes totaling $500 billion that will hit
medical innovators, health insurance, and even the sale of your home.
4. The Independent Payment
Advisory Board. IPAB will still stand, with its rationing power
over Medicare.
5. State exchanges.
States will be compelled to set up vast new bureaucracies to check into our
finances and families so they can hand out generous taxpayer subsidies for
health insurance to families earning up to $90,000 a year.
6. Medicare payment cuts.
$575 billion in payment reductions to Medicare providers and Medicare Advantage
plans will cause more and more physicians to stop seeing Medicare patients,
exacerbating access problems.
7. Higher health-care costs.
The Kaiser Family Foundation says the average price of a family policy has
risen by $2,200 during the Obama administration. The president promised
premiums would be $2,500 lower by this year. Hospitals, doctors, businesses,
and consumers all expect their taxes and health costs to rise under Obamacare.
8. Government control over
doctor decisions. Value-based payments, quality reporting
requirements, and government comparative-effectiveness boards will dictate how
doctors practice medicine. Nearly half of all physicians are seriously
considering leaving practice, leading to a severe doctor shortage.
9. Huge deficits.
The CBO has raised its cost estimate for the law to $1.76 trillion over ten
years, but that is only the opening bid as more and more people lose their
job-based coverage and flood into taxpayer-subsidized insurance. At this rate,
the cost will be $2 trillion, not the less than $1 trillion the president
promised.
10. 159 new boards, agencies, and
programs: The Obama administration will work quickly to set up
as many of the law’s new bureaucracies as fast as it can so they can take root
before the election.

This will be playing out over time and offers Romney plenty
of fodder to use in the coming election.

4. Robert’s ruling a Benefit or a Tax?

OK, it’s hard to admit but my initial
reaction to this morning’s Obamacare decision by the Supreme Court – a snide
tweet branding Chief Justice John Roberts as another “gift” from
President George W. Bush like the Medicare Prescription Drug benefit program –
was embarrassingly hasty.

After reading and stewing about it
all day, I’ve concluded that what
Roberts has done is fundamentally shift the constitutional debate away from the
liberal assumption since the Woodrow Wilson era that an Imperial Presidency
and supine Congress can pretty much do
as they please so long as it’s covered by at least one of those fig leaves
known as the General Welfare, Necessary and Proper or Commerce clauses of the
Constitution.

The new assumption is, thanks to
Roberts, that at least two of those clauses in fact cannot simply be dragooned
into the service of whatever a passing majority in Congress wants to do. And
having shifted the meaning of those two clauses, courts will likely now have to
view the other clause differently as well.

In other words, the Constitution means something today that it didn’t yesterday, at
least in terms of constitutional precedent. It’s not a grand rout of
liberalism from the field of battle, but the correlation of constitutional forces has now shifted under
their feet in such a way that they must
go over to the defensive on ground not of their choosing.

Further, the holding that Obamacare
passes constitutional muster if it is understood as a tax may be an even more
significant victory for conservatives. To understand why, which of these two
words sounds more positive? “Benefit” or “tax”? Who is more likely to prevail – the advocate offering a positive
benefit without having to explain in any detail how it will be funded, or the
advocate who right out front says your taxes have to go up but, trust me,
you’re going to love this new benefit?...

This is probably the best silver lining I’ve read about since
the verdict on Obamacare was written.Precedent is a powerful force and Roberts has changed the precedents not
to the liberals benefit.In fact they
will now be taxed with the responsibility to telling people not only the
benefit but the cost.

Expect to see a lot more like this.I especially thought “not any of your
taxes.You will not see your taxes go
up.”Barack Obama was particularly
effective.

6. Mickey Klaus on the Repeal of Obamacare

…After all, why
couldn’t Republicans use the “reconciliation” process to get around a Dem
filibuster? Lizza says:

But reconciliation wouldn’t work
here—the process
can only be used for policies that have budgetary effects and a C.B.O. score.
Much of the A.C.A., such as the insurance exchanges and subsidies, would fall
under these categories. But a lot of it, including the hated individual
mandate, does not. Repealing the
exchanges and subsides without repealing the mandate and the other regulations
and cost controls in the law would create a health-care Frankenstein that a
President Romney would be rather nuts to support.

Huh? The individual mandate is a tax! The Supreme Court has now told
us. Maybe the Senate parliamentarian calls it something else–but whatever
you call it, it raises revenue and repealing it would have a budgetary effect,
and hence be reconciliationable.Here’s Republican Congressional expert Keith
Hennessey admitting that the mandate is subject to reconciliation (and this at a time when his interest was in
blocking Obamacare, which meant having as few things subject to
reconciliation as possible). Certainly the
GOPs could cut the monetary penalty (ax-tay) for not having health insurance
to, say, a dime. That would certainly have a budgetary effect and a C.B.O.
score.

Maybe the exchanges themselves
wouldn’t be reconcilable, but if Romney
could get rid of the mandate and the subsidies the exchanges would be stripped
of their power as a vehicle to ensure universal coverage. Obamacare would
effectively be repealed.

Frum,** for his part,
thinks politics will preclude repeal even before the main parts of the Act kick
in in 2014:

[E]ven
if Republicans do win the White House and Senate in 2012, how much appetite
will they then have for that 1-page repeal bill? Suddenly it will be
their town halls filled with outraged senior citizens whose
benefits are threatened; their incumbencies that will be threatened

Again,
huh? Senior citizens already have
Medicare. They hate Obamacare, in part because it came packaged with Medicare
cuts. Why would they storm town halls to protest its repeal?

Facts are not things the left really likes to look at if it goes
against them.I thought Frum’s comments
about senior citizens filling town halls with because their benefits are
threatened is true.But it will be
Democrats town halls, not Republicans for the reasons Klaus outlined here.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Story #1 is
the story that Obamacare was found Constitutional (with just a little bit of
rewriting by SCOTUS).#2 looks at the
effect of the decision to keep Obamacare.#3 in the meantime shows the Eric Holder was found in contempt of
congress with 17 Democrats joining the Republicans.#4 talks about the cuts in defense.#5 has three graphs demonstrating how the
Dodd Frank financial reform bill evidently hurt the recovery.#6 looks at the difference in coverage of
campaign fund raising from 2008 to 2012.#7 reviews how the courts have sided with Florida in purging its lists
of illegal aliens.

Today’s
Thoughts

The surprise ruling that Obamacare is
Constitutional because the mandate
is actually a tax does have a silver
lining.Tax bills cannot be filibustered
in the Senate.

In another thought in view of President Obama telling ICE not to deport a
certain group of illegals, can President
Romney tell the IRS not to collect this tax?

Here’s a good question about Fast and Furious.What was
putting 2,500 untraceable guns in the hands of Mexican drug dealers was
supposed to accomplish?Could that
be what the Justice Department is hiding?

1. Obamacare stands:Conservatives scratch their heads

Artur
Davis was the only member of the Congressional Black Caucus to oppose Obamacare
in 2010. Later that year, the four-term
Democrat lost a primary in Alabama for governor in part on his opposition to
the law. Since then, Davis has moved to the right, and even went so far as to
join the Republican party last month. The Harvard Law School graduate and
former civil-rights lawyer’s reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling is
stinging. He thinks the Court gave in to elite opinion that claimed the court’s
legitimacy would be hurt if Obamacare were overturned.

He wrote in Politico’s Arena:

John Roberts’
surprise defection is a policy victory for Barack Obama that is worth no
votes: just as Democrats miscalculated
in 2010 by assuming that the passage of the healthcare law would prove that
they could get things done, they are drawing the wrong lesson today if
they assume a court’s vindication of an unpopular law will somehow validate the
first Obama term. The hostility to Obamacare among
independents and swing voters is based on the cold fact that precious few
of them believe it has done a thing to lower their premiums or improve their
coverage, and that won’t change.

But there is a larger story: this
result shows the left’s continuing
capacity to shape elite opinion by marginalizing positions that roughly
half the country holds. Just as the left has caricatured opposition to
same-sex marriage and abortion as retrograde and extreme, it just pulled off
the same feat in the context of Obamacare: the case was made, and Roberts
bought it, that a Court that has struck
down 169 congressional statutes would somehow be dangerously activist
if it added a 170th one to the mix. Its an undemocratic,
disingenuous sleight of hand that the left is practicing, but it is
winning: the cost is that it only widens the gap between Middle
America and the elite.

This was a surprise and we shouldn’t make light of it.It is a victory of Obama.But the statement above shows that it isn’t
an unmitigated victory.

2. SCOTUS’s ruling and the effect on Freedom

I know it doesn’t look like it at first glance, but it really is (a victory
for limited government). When this
legislative atrocity first passed, it was assumed by most people that the
Commerce Clause had rendered the Ninth and Tenth Amendments dead letters,
per Wockard, and that there really were no limits to federal power. A few
lonely voices (particularly Randy Barnett) argued that in fact there were such
limits, and that this bill exceeded them. He was scoffed at by many, but those
same people were shocked when the court actually took that argument seriously a
few months ago. And today, a 5-4 majority of the court, including the Chief
Justice, declared that in fact those
limits exist and that ObamaCare did indeed transgress them.The bill was allowed to stand only because
Justice Roberts declared that it passed constitutional muster under the
Congress’s ability to tax (presumably under Article I, Section 8), and that
while it had been fraudulently passed (that’s why the president had to lie
about it being a tax — he knew that if he admitted it, he would not only lose
whatever “moderate” support he had for it, but that he would be going back on
his promise not to raise taxes on the middle class), that didn’t make it
unconstitutional. Here is a key phrase from his opinion: “It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their
political choices.”

The nation made a terrible political choice in 2008. It started to fix it in
2010, largely driven by this monstrosity. We
have another chance in November to fix it once and for all, with a new
president and Senate, and I suspect that’s going to happen. But going forward, future courts will
recognize that the Commerce Clause is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for any
tyrannical thing that the federal government chooses to do. If we want to
continue to rein it in, an amendment of the taxing clause might be useful going
forward.

An interesting look at what happened
today and one that is hopeful.It is now
time to repeal Obamacare

3. Holder held “in contempt” of Congress

The House on Thursday cited Attorney
General Eric Holder for contempt of Congress in a historic vote weighted
with political significance, though it does little to break the stalemate over
his decision to withhold documents over the Justice Department’s actions in a
botched gun-walking operation.The 256-67 vote amounted to a
political spanking for Mr. Holder and President Obama, and 17 Democrats joined
with Republicans in demanding the documents be released. Most Democrats,
however, walked out in protest of the vote.

It marks the first time an attorney general has been held in contempt by a
chamber.

But the White House dismissed the proceedings as a sideshow, and the vote
does nothing to break the impasse, though it further poisoned feelings in an
already bitterly divided chamber.

“No Justice Department is above the
law, and no Justice Department is above the Constitution,” said House
Speaker John Boehner, Ohio Republican.

Democrats pleaded with the Republicans to slow down the proceedings, saying
the oversight committee, led by Chairman Darrell Issa, California Republican,
has done a shoddy job in putting together its investigation.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Texas Democrat, even introduced a resolution
demanding that the House reprimand Mr. Issa for partisanship and accusing him
of having “engaged in a witch hunt.”

Many Democrats walked out of the contempt vote in protest, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California
Democrat, said the vote was a black eye for the Republicans….

Sometimes you have to think that Nancy
Pelosi is suffering from dementia.This
is a black eye, but it is a black eye for the attorney general.

4. Defense Cuts and the Ramifications

Colorado's wildfire has exploded into an "epic firestorm," in the
words of Colorado Springs fire chief Richard Brown. Over 30,000 people have
evacuated, and already hundreds of homes have been consumed. Ironically, the U.S. Air Force Academy has
also been evacuated, at the very time that Colorado desperately needs more Air
Force C-130s to fight the massive fire.

A
C-130 fitted with the Modular Airborne FireFighting System (MAFFS) can drop
3,000 gallons of fire-retardant material in 5 seconds, and reload in just 15
minutes. This tempo is crucial to containing wildfires like the one devastating
Colorado Springs. However, of a
current fleet of nearly 380 C-130s, only eight can be fitted with the MAFFS—and
four of them are already in the skies over Colorado. With another fire looming
in the north of the state, there is no excess capacity to help protect civilian
areas. That means thousands of exhausted firefighters on the ground are without
enough of the crucial support they need to control the fires.

All this raises concerns about
President Obama’s defense budget, which cuts 65 C-130s from the fleet over the
next four years. While that will leave 318 C-130s, the
demands on the fleet are not shrinking in Afghanistan or other places. Nor
did the Air Force have much choice in the matter…

What a difference four years make. Around this time in 2008, Sen. Barack
Obama was well on his way to shattering every campaign fundraising record on
the books. Before his campaign was over, the great reformer from Chicago
decided public campaign financing wasn't so great after all — and he passed it
up in favor of accepting almost three-quarters of a billion dollars in
contributions.

But for a handful of muted good-government voices, the entire political left celebrated Obama's fundraising as proof of
his extraordinary support and mass appeal. When it was over, the president-elect outspent his political
opponent, John McCain, by more than 3-to-1.

Fast forward to 2012 and Mitt Romney's first month of out-fundraising the
president, notwithstanding the fact that Obama has spent more time fundraising,
by a factor of two or more, than any incumbent president in history. All of a sudden, the news is awash in the
left's concerns about unregulated campaign fundraising.

Twice in the past week, in fact, The New
York Times editorial page singled out Republican fundraising efforts as a
serious threat to our democracy.

In the more sanctimonious of its two editorials, the Times railed against
Sheldon Adelson, a wealthy casino owner who gave $20 million to Newt Gingrich
in his unsuccessful bid to capture the Republican nomination and now has
pledged millions more for the Romney campaign effort.

Apparently blind to its own reporting
that Adelson's money did virtually nothing to help Gingrich, the Times is now
in a state of panic that Adelson's money could upset the balance of the fall
campaign. Even worse — for the Times — the editors wrote that Adelson was
“attempting to advance his personal, ideological and financial agenda, which is
wildly at odds with the nation's needs.”..

It appears the NYT doesn’t have any
real principles except they want the left to win and whatever helps that is what
they will come out for.

7. Court Okays Florida Purging of voter rolls

A federal judge has upheld the
legality of Florida’s purge of non-citizens from voting rolls, denying the
Obama administration’s request for a halt to the program, which could
handicap Obama’s performance in Florida.

The Orlando Sentinel reports:

The Justice
Department had asked for a restraining order, arguing that the program
attempting to remove 2,600 non-citizens from the voter rolls violated federal
voting law that prohibits the systemic removal of voters 90 days before an
election.

U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle said that,
according to his reading of the law, the
90-day provision did not apply to removing non-citizens from the rolls….

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Story #1 tells
reminds us of how Obama seems to change his position depending on how close the
election is.#2 looks to see if voter
apathy is bad (it isn’t).#3 has John
Stossel cheering on discrimination.#4 is
about Mia Love, the new black Republican woman who is running for
congress.#5 looks at the money likely
to be raised and spent in 2012.

Today’s
Thoughts

Revenge of the incumbents:U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch has
won Utah's Republican primary and
Charlie Rangel won the Democratic nomination for his 22 term in office.

Leno
on Obama spending more money than he took in in May:“That’s
called being a Democrat.”

“Yesterday, his
advisers (Romney) tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a
difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.”Barack Obama.Seriously you
can’t make up that he doesn’t understand
the difference between the two.Outsourcing happens when an
American firm hires IBM to take over its IT function .

1. Obama and the truth

A sign of
an undisciplined mind is serial lapses into self-contradiction, or blurting out a thought only to refute it entirely on a
later occasion. For a president to do that is to erode public confidence and
eventually render all his public statements irrelevant. That is now
unfortunately the case with Barack Obama, who has established a muddled record
of confused and contradictory declarations.

Last week, the president invoked executive privilege to
prevent the release of administration documents related to the Fast and Furious
operation. All presidents on occasion use
that tactic, but rarely after they have put themselves on record, as did Senator
Obama just five years ago, damning the
practice as a de facto admission of wrongdoing. Does President Obama remember
his earlier denunciation — or why he thought a special prosecutor was
necessary to look into the Scooter Libby case, but not the far greater mess
surrounding Eric Holder?

About the same time, President Obama offered de facto amnesty
for an estimated 800,000 to 1 million illegal aliens. Aside from his
circumvention of Congress and his casual attitude toward his own constitutional
duty to enforce the laws as they are written, Obama had on two earlier occasions stated that he not only would not
grant such blanket exemptions from the law, but also legally could not. That
was then, this is now — the middle of a reelection campaign?...

It's a sure sign someone is losing when he demands that the
rules be changed.

That might explain the renewed
interest in forcing people to vote against their will. Peter Orszag, President Obama's former budget director and now a
vice chairman at Citigroup, recently wrote a column for Bloomberg View arguing for making voting mandatory.

He's not alone. Icons of the Beltway
establishment Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann also favor the idea. As does
William Galston, a former advisor to President Clinton. (Mann and Galston are
scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution; Ornstein is a colleague of mine
at the American Enterprise Institute.)

While I have great respect for
Ornstein, Mann and Galston -- I'm undecided about Orszag -- I find the idea absurd, cynical and
repugnant.

Let's start with the repugnant part.

One of the chief benefits of coerced
voting, according to Orszag, is that it increases participation. Well, yes, and
kidnapping drunks in pubs increased the ranks of the British navy, but it
didn't turn the conscripted sailors into patriots.

I think everyone can agree that
civic virtue depends on civic participation. Well, any reasonable understanding
of civic participation has to include the idea of voluntarism. If I force you
to do the right thing against your will, you don't get credit for doing the
right thing.

Let's move on to the absurdity. Ornstein and Mann suggest fining people,
say $15, if they don't vote and using the proceeds to set up a lottery to bribe
reluctant voters. If the old line that lotteries are taxes on stupid people
is correct, then the upshot of this proposal is that the cure to what ails
democracy is an influx of large numbers of stupid voters….

We don’t need more stupid people voting without having the
slightest idea of who or what they are voting on.This is kind of a poll tax in reverse.

3. Stossel on the benefits of Discrimination

I’m scared.

I fear that even if the Supreme
Court overrules most of Obamacare (or did already, by the time you read this), Republicans will join Democrats in
restoring “good” parts of the law, like the requirement that insurance
companies cover kids up to age 26 and every American with a pre-existing
condition.

Those parts of Obamacare are popular.
People like getting
what they think is free stuff. But requiring coverage to age 26 makes
policies cost more.

Even Bill O’Reilly lectures me that
government should ban discrimination against those with pre-existing
conditions. Most Americans agree with him. Who likes discrimination? Racial
discrimination was one of the ugliest parts of American history. None of us
wants to be discriminated against. But discrimination
is part of freedom. We discriminate when we choose our friends or our
spouse, or when we choose what we do with our time.

Above all, discrimination is what makes insurance work. An insurance regime where everyone pays the same amount is
called “community rating.” That sounds fair. No more cruel discrimination
against the obese or people with cancer. But
community rating is as destructive as ordering flood insurance companies to
charge me nothing extra to insure my very vulnerable beach house, or
ordering car insurance companies to charge Lindsay Lohan no more than they
charge you. Such one-size-fits-all rules take away insurance companies’ best
tool: risk-based pricing. Risk-based pricing encourages us to take better care
of ourselves.

Car insurance works because companies reward good drivers
and charge the Lindsay Lohans more.
If the state forces insurance companies to stop discriminating, that kills the
business model.

No-discrimination insurance isn’t insurance. It’s welfare. If the politicians’ plan was to create another government
welfare program, they ought to own up to that instead of hiding the cost.

Obama — and the Clintons before him
— expressed outrage that insurance companies charged people different rates
based on their risk profiles. They want
everyone covered for the same “fair” price….

Most people don’t really think in this
regard, they simply emote.The point of
preexisting conditions is that you should have had insurance before you got the
condition.The left recognizes that and
that is why they insist on a mandate with health insurance.If that goes down, then everyone will have to
take personal responsibility for this.

4. Mia Love for Congress

Today’s Washington Post contains a front page story about Mia Love, the Republican candidate for Congress in Utah’s Fourth
Congressional District. Love, age 36, is the mayor of Saratoga Springs, a
rapidly growing Utah town of about 18,000. She
is also Black, Mormon, and quite conservative. If elected, she will become
the first Black female Republican member of Congress.

Love entered politics when she heard talk about taking the words “under God”
out of the Pledge of Allegiance. As
mayor of Saratoga Springs, she has shown a strong commitment to balanced
budgets. Love vows to apply the same approach to the federal budget. For
example, she has advocated eliminating the Energy and Education departments. Her campaign focuses on issues such as tax
reform, energy exploration, and a strong military. It also emphasizes
fiscal responsibility, smaller government, and personal responsibility.

Paul Ryan recently hosted a fundraiser for Love. He told the audience, “Mia
has a great opportunity to extend the message of liberty and economic freedom
in ways that many of us can’t, and we’re excited about that.”

Standing in the way of this happy scenario is Jim Matheson, the incumbent Democrat. Matheson is a moderate (he voted
against Obamacare, for example), but too liberal for Utah, I would have
thought. Republicans make up a majority of voters in the Fourth District. The
Cook Political Report considers the race a toss-up.

Matheson’s big advantage is money.
Thus far, according to the Post, he has outraised Love by a ratio of 10-1….

As the Wisconsin recall unfolded,
Democrats watched in horrified helplessness as their candidate was overwhelmed
by the other side's seemingly endless millions of dollars. Then came the
news that Mitt Romney's campaign was raising more money than the president's
reelection effort. And every few days seem to bring new reports of right-wing
billionaires boasting of the tens or even hundreds of millions they plan to
pour into the effort to defeat the president.

Even as Obama narrowly leads most polls,
a creeping sense of doom underlies many conversations among liberals these
days: the haunting fear that the left may get so swamped by the other
side's money that the president and his allies are rendered simply unable to
compete.

Democrats have been acutely nervous about the potential for massive GOP
spending ever since the 2010 Citizens United decision by the
Supreme Court helped open the floodgates of campaign spending. But in recent weeks the level of alarm has
escalated to panic.

"If the president and his allies get outspent like Democrats did in
Wisconsin, Wisconsin could happen all over again" in the general election,
said Bill Burton, the senior strategist for the Obama-supporting super PAC
Priorities USA, which has struggled to keep pace with its Republican
counterpart….

Obama outspent McCain by over 2 to 1
in 2008.In Wisconsin, Scott Walker
outspent the recall groups about 2 to 1 (not the 7-1 the Democrats like to talk
about).And it looks as if Romney may be
able to outspend Obama this year by 2-1.Perhaps panic is a smart move on the Democrats part.